by Adair, Bobby
“Keep the pole between you and the choppers,” he said. “They’ll never see us, even if they have infrared.”
“Infrared?” I asked, “Do they have that?”
“How would I know?”
“You were in the Army.”
“That doesn’t mean I know everything. I rode in ‘em. I didn’t fly ‘em.”
“Do you try to be difficult?” I searched the sky. The helicopters were getting close.
“No,” he answered. “It just happens. Mostly just to you.”
Murphy leaned around the post to look as well.
One of the helicopters flew directly overhead and caught the attention of the horde. It slowed and turned a wide circle in the air above the downed Black Hawk.
The bus we’d just torched had enough flames roiling out of its windows to illuminate thousands and thousands of screaming Whites.
The other helicopter flew by, following the course of the highway east. It didn’t slow when it passed its downed comrade.
No one in either helicopter fired.
“Recon,” Murphy deduced.
“Let’s go set that next fire.”
Murphy put a hand on my arm. “Wait.”
“What?”
He pointed at the helicopter that had been circling. It was coming back toward us.
“Other side of the pole.” Murphy quickly hid himself.
I did too, while keeping an eye on the coming copter. Moments later, it passed overhead, going back toward Fort Hood. The sound of White voices changed and grew distinctly closer.
I pointed at the retreating helicopter. “They’ve done our work for us. The horde is going to chase them all the way to the front gate.”
“It can’t be more than a mile or two now,” said Murphy. “Just up the highway here.”
I heaved a deep breath. “How many miles do you have left in your legs?”
“Won’t matter,” said Murphy. “If these dipshits aren’t bright enough to hide their position from the horde with the first helicopter, the second helicopter will come right back this way, too. You’re right. They’ll do our work for us. We don’t need to burn anything else. All we need to do is get out of their way and let nature take its course.”
“Survival of the fittest.” I had another thought and laughed. “Or death of the stupidest.”
“Don’t get too cocky, dude. They’ve nearly gotten us plenty of times.”
“Can’t argue with that.” I looked at the billboard towering above us, wondering how I could get myself up there before the horde closed in. “We need to find a place to observe from.”
“Observe?” Murphy asked, emphasizing the question in the word.
“You know,” I admitted, “until I spot the Smart Ones. You know what I need to do.”
Shaking his head, Murphy jogged away, not down the highway, but away from it. “If you were a Smart One, you'd let the dipshits kill each other and you'd stay out of it."
“It won’t work that way,” I told him as I matched his pace. “The Smart Ones will keep themselves out of harm’s way.”
“Sounds like Null Spot rationalizations to me.”
Chapter 54
Even though we were running away from the main body of the horde moving up the highway, the sound of their screaming was everywhere. If I hadn’t known where they were, I wouldn’t have been able to guess.
As the sky turned brighter with the coming of morning, I saw everything around us and realized that we'd run our way into a semi-rural area with lots of houses and long rows of fences. But I couldn't see anything of the horde or the helicopters.
“It’s too flat here,” I said as I slowed and stopped.
Murphy stopped and turned to look at me.
I told him, “We can’t see anything.”
“We’ll find a spot. A building or something to get on top of.”
I looked east to where the helicopter had gone, but not yet returned.
"It hasn't been that long," said Murphy. "It'll come back.”
“I’ve put too much into this to take a chance.”
Murphy heaved a sigh.
I laid my machete on the ground, took off my jacket, and pulled my shirt over my head. “It’s time for Null Spot to do his work.” I expected a laugh out of Murphy.
“It’s dumbass time.” He wasn’t amused.
“Give me a quart of lighter fluid—a full one—and a lighter. A couple of lighters,” I told him. “I’ll get out in front of the horde and keep burning things, if I have to. If not, I’ll infiltrate and hunt for the Smart Ones.”
Murphy reluctantly took a quart out of his bag.
I finished undressing. “That silvery stadium thing that looks like a tiny Astrodome—”
“The Bell County Expo Center,” Murphy confirmed.
I nodded my head north. “It’s up that way a couple of miles. Just off the highway.”
“I know where it is.”
“Go there.”
“What am I supposed to do there?” Murphy frowned and added, “Boss.”
“Don’t be a bitch.” I put my boots back on. “Things are going to get chaotic pretty quick, here. If the naked horde finds you, they’ll kill you, unless you want to strip down and come with me.”
Murphy shook his head. “Going without clothes and a gun is for Null Spot dumbasses. Not me.”
“You said you were behind me on this.”
“I figured you’d come to your senses by now.”
I forced a harsh laugh. “We’ve been through too much shit together for you to believe that.” I tucked two lighters into my boot beside my extra knife. “This thing with the naked horde and the Survivor Army is going down today, right now. By tonight, it’ll be over, one way or the other. Find a place on the roof of the Expo Center. You’ll be able to see everything you need to see from up there. You still got those binoculars, right? You didn’t leave them in the truck, did you?”
“Got ‘em.”
“I’ll come to the Expo Center when it’s over.”
Murphy didn’t respond.
“If you keep an eye out, you’ll find the Smart Ones. Just keep looking. They’ll be near the center of the horde, out of danger. If you don’t see them, just scan around until you see a White running in the wrong direction. That’ll be a messenger. Follow the runners. They’ll lead you back to the Smart Ones. If you see the Smart Ones, you’ll see me. I’ll be nearby.”
Murphy sighed.
“You know I need to do this.”
“You tell yourself that.”
“Doesn’t matter why, I need to. I need to.” The reasons I felt like I needed to boiled up from repressed feelings to rage. Too many people I cared about were dead because of these naked white fuckers.”
“I’m not going to try and talk you out of this anymore.” Murphy looked away from me, apparently scouting out which direction he was going to go. “I’ll keep an eye on you from a distance, and—”
“No,” I told him. “You can’t follow and snipe anymore. That worked out in the country, because they stayed together and there were plenty of hills for you to use as a vantage point." I waved at the houses around us. "It’s only going to get worse the closer we get to Fort Hood. The risk is too great. The Whites will find you and kill you."
Murphy shook his head.
“You know I’m right. Let me do what I need to do without worrying about you. I’ll see you when it’s over.” I turned and walked away. It was time to do what only I could get close enough to do.
Chapter 55
Following the sound of frenzied howling, I found myself behind a big box store. I made my way around it and crossed the parking lot, being careful to use the abandoned cars for cover, when I heard a helicopter come close. When I came to the tall store sign at the end of the parking lot, I climbed up on its footing, a three-foot concrete cube, to get a view across the highway.
A river of Whites flowed five hundred feet wide, shoulder to shoulder, back to chest, running
and angry. They covered the highway lanes, the shoulders, the medians, and the access roads, solid as far as I could see from east to west. Their numbers had to exceed a hundred thousand. Hell, there might have been twice that many.
No wonder they destroyed everything they came across.
Half a dozen helicopters were in the air, some hovering over the highway up ahead. Others were flying around in no particular pattern, perhaps trying to measure the size of the threat coming their way.
I scanned across the horde, looking for Whites moving in the wrong direction. As I told Murphy, those would be the messengers carrying instructions from the leadership out to their subordinates in the front or on the flanks.
Far ahead, probably from Fort Hood itself, another five helicopters rose into the air.
Things were getting ready to happen. I had the urge to jump off my vantage point and run with the horde, thinking that from within, I might better be able to see what was hidden from me at the moment.
A line of Whites peeled away from the main horde, right in front of me. All behind one leader, snaking as it went, the line grew quickly past a hundred, then two hundred strong. All along the flanks of the horde, more lines peeled off, a thousand strong, two thousand strong. All still going in the general direction of Fort Hood, but spreading out.
The Smart Ones saw the helicopters overhead just as easily as I did. They knew what those Black Hawks represented. They knew bloodshed was coming. They were moving their forces into formations to surround and overwhelm.
I spotted several Whites beneath an overpass, not running, but hugging the concrete poles and looking around, doing much the same thing I was doing.
Shit.
Those were the messengers. They weren’t running, they were waiting for the horde to come to them and watching for the recipients among the mass. That meant the Smart Ones had to be somewhere up ahead.
I jumped down from the sign’s concrete base and ran with the flow of the horde, but that flow was losing its distinction. The single file lines of Whites that had been peeling away were growing into tentacles of the infected, running four, five, and six abreast.
I stayed on the fringes as I proceeded, keeping off the highway and running through fast-food restaurant parking lots, around muffler shops, and past business parks.
I came to the crest of a rise, hoping that I’d get a clear view of the horde, a good part of Killeen, and maybe even some of the Fort Hood buildings in the distance. A Red Lobster restaurant stood on the corner, and I crossed the parking lot and jogged around back. Access to the roof via a ladder for servicing the air conditioners and vent hoods would be located there.
Indeed, it was, and with no security device on the ladder to prevent unauthorized access.
I tossed my bottle of lighter fluid up on the roof and then climbed in a hurry. Thankfully, the mansard style of the roof gave me what was effectively a wall to stand behind and look out. I glanced east and saw the horde still flowing up the highway toward me, though thinning in the far distance.
Nearly a dozen helicopters were still flying in no specific direction, maintaining an altitude that would leave the Whites below in range of their weaponry.
In front of the horde's leading Whites, I saw Humvees, a couple of tanks, and armored fighting vehicles. They didn't seem to be organized in any way I could discern, except that they formed a ragged line of about thirty vehicles across the highway and spread out a good distance on both sides.
A muzzle flashed from the machine gun mounted on the roof of a Humvee near the center of the line. More muzzles flashed along the line and the sound of several dozen machine guns hit me, along with the screams of hundreds of Whites, suddenly shrill with pain.
The helicopters spat fire down in any direction where Whites charged forward, which was every direction.
A war cry from the horde swelled so loudly for a moment that it drowned out the sound from all the guns.
Explosions burst in the main body of the Whites, but it didn't slow the mass down. The horde absorbed the explosions and the bullets and kept on at full speed toward the vehicles.
A couple of Humvees retreated from the line, got several hundred yards away from where they’d left their comrades to fight, and were ambushed by a line of Whites pouring out of a side street. In seconds, the Humvees were hidden under mounds of writhing white bodies, fighting for a way to get inside. Both Humvees stopped moving.
I crouched behind the mansard. The firepower and destruction were awesome and frightening.
A tank accelerated forward into the horde, the commander perhaps thinking that running the Whites over might be a more effective way to slaughter them. Another tank moved in.
Some of the other vehicles moved—some closer together, some in retreat. The naked horde had them surrounded, but had to be taking massive losses, with all the bullets flying at such close range. From where I stood, it was hard to see the dead and wounded, since they were immediately run over by the ones charging forward from behind.
I looked for a pocket of control in all the chaos. Somewhere out there, the Smart Ones had to be passing out orders and listening to whispered messages.
Chapter 56
Thirty minutes or an hour into the battle, I started to question my choice to tell Murphy to go to the Expo Center, as I realized my perch on the roof of the Red Lobster was exactly what we’d wanted to find. Then I recalled what I’d gone through to get here. I’d been surrounded by naked Whites nearly the whole time after separating from Murphy. They’d have killed him.
Sending him away was the best thing.
It wasn’t clear yet which way the battle was going to go. It wasn’t quite winding down, but the intensity was diminishing. Maybe half the helicopters had disengaged one at a time and flown back to Fort Hood. I assumed they’d run out of ammunition and had gone to resupply or refuel. The fact that none had yet returned left other possibilities on the table. They might have seen the fight as lost and fled while they still had sufficient ammunition and fuel to get away. The other possibility was that some of those Whites who’d peeled off from the main horde had run onto the base. The Smart Ones had to know Fort Hood lay up the road. They had probably deduced where the copters and armored vehicles had come from. Whites may have been waiting to ambush the helicopters when they landed for resupply.
Without the helicopters, it looked to me like it would be very hard for any in the Survivor Army to live through the day.
The two tanks that had brutishly plowed into the horde had indeed left carnage in their wake. But they’d been completely swarmed by Whites, such that the tanks became invisible under the layers. Their drivers were probably blind, as well. One of them ran into a concrete drainage ditch with vertical sides, and got stuck. Another drove through the wall of a welding supply store. Shortly after, a huge explosion blew the roof off the building and took out one of the helicopters that had the misfortune to be flying nearby. It had been burning and exploding ever since.
At least a third of the Humvees were out of action. Some were gone, though it was clear that they were fighting a running engagement through the streets, using their mobility to their advantage.
As for the horde, naked bodies were everywhere, in many places, forming a carpet so thick that I couldn’t see the color of the ground around them.
I grew anxious as I realized that the battle might fizzle out in the next hour or so. I’d scanned over the horde so many times that I started to doubt that the Smart Ones were there at all. I wondered if they’d taken cover in one of the buildings in the area and how I’d figure out which one, because as much as I tried to see messengers running across the current of the moving horde, that became impossible. Minutes after the gunfire started, it seemed every White was moving in a different direction, although the mass of them still flowed toward the guns.
The more I thought about the idea of cover, the more it made sense. I’d been looking for the Smart Ones out in the open, but I wasn’t out in the open. At leas
t, not out in the killing zone. Why? Because I wasn’t stupid. It was too easy to die out there with all those bullets flying. That meant the Smart Ones wouldn’t be out there, either.
I strained my eyes as I looked from building to building for any Whites behaving unusually.
I’d taken a hard look at four or five when I noticed a large culvert running beneath the highway—actually a series of four culverts, one under each access road, one beneath each set of highway lanes. In the flat creek bed on both sides of one of the culverts, dozens of Whites stood, all looking into the pipe.
They weren’t looking at the battle around them. They didn’t look up at the helicopters when they flew over. They didn’t crouch when something exploded nearby. They were waiting in line.
As I watched, one after another ran out from under the road in an unexplained direction. Other Whites ran down into the ditch and into the culvert.
I’ve got you fuckers now.
All I needed was a plan. Short that, I had my machete, my knife, and enough confidence that I knew I could stroll right into that culvert and do some real damage before I fought my way out or they all ran away like a bunch of pussies.
At least, that’s how it all looked when I pictured it in my imagination.
Chapter 57
Plenty of Whites were still running up Highway 190 toward the battle. They were the slowest of the horde, spread out thinly for miles. Lucky for them, I thought. They’d miss most of the chances to be killed by the time they joined the battle. The good thing for me about running with them was that the helicopter pilots were largely ignoring the highway, as the density of the horde there was thinnest relative to most everywhere else.
As I crossed the distance to the culvert, my excitement subsided a bit and I had time to think. Most importantly, I had time to realize that my Rambo plan, that of running into the culvert with blades flying, was doomed to failure. It was a plan born of impatience and a need for vengeance, built on an intuition for slaughter learned from watching action movies.
